Choice, Customer Success, Journey Sales, Partner 0 Comment

It’s a common misconception that customer experience starts after the purchase of your product or service. In reality, customer experience starts way before that, at your first touchpoint with the customer—sales.

The days of sales teams driving the customer buying experience are firmly in the rearview.

The customer runs the show now. Much of that shift has to do with their Amazon-ification. Outside of the office, your customers are Amazon customers.

Amazon has perfected (and somehow continues to perfect) the B2C buying experience. And when they step back into the office to evaluate solutions and perhaps buy from you, they now have certain expectations when it comes to the customer experience.

Unfortunately, most of salespeople aren’t equipped enough to align with those expectations.

1) Ignoring the “Digital First” Experience

Digital doesn’t mean websites and email.

In fact, those are exactly the things your customers have come to loathe! Digital, through the lens of what the journey needs to be, is about ensuring that the customer experience you’re orchestrating is consumable on their terms.

Deliver a customer experience that is responsive and looks and feels great on any device—just like Amazon does!

2) Not Personalizing the Customer Buying Journey

No two Amazon users experience the same thing. The journey is personalized.

There’s user-specific messaging and custom content. Everything is tailored. B2B sales professionals that personalize messaging and content win more deals. But that doesn’t mean extra work. If Amazon can automate personalization, you can too. It’s all about implementing the right salestech stack that’s designed around your customer’s expectations.

3) Overlooking Custom Educational Content

Most buying experiences are just that: salesy.

But with the customer taking the reins, the content delivered needs to be educational. There are a lot of buyers involved in a purchase decision and the decisions themselves take time.

Teeing up content that is insight-oriented, educational, and helps your customer think differently about the problem you’re collectively trying to solve is far more valuable than walking through yet another sales deck.

Amazon does this in the B2C world to perfection. Everything you could possibly want to learn about a product—from independent reviews to use cases is at your fingertips. Deliver the same in your B2B customer experience.

4) Refusing to Meet Your Customers Halfway

Most sales pros talk a good customer collaboration game, but in practice, few follow through on it.

Collaboration isn’t just about a needs analysis conversation or a discovery call. Collaboration today is about selling and buying teams working together to improve the buyer’s business.

That means everybody at the table, no matter when they join the sales process, is on the same page. It means delivering a digital experience that meets customers where they are, on their terms.

5) Suffocating Your Customers with Little Privacy

Even though Amazon is massive, it’s customer experience feels private and almost exclusive.

As a result, your buyer is looking for a customer experience that goes a step further than a brochure website. They want a digital environment where their team can work with your team collaboratively, and they want an experience that isn’t out there in the open for all to see.

At the end of the day, what your buyer expects out of a customer experience has changed. Does a lot of it have to do with the buying experience expectations Amazon has hammered home? Sure.

But a lot of it also has to do with the fact that the customer is now in control. Sales pros that recognize that truth and build personalized customer experiences around it will, well, win more customers!

This is a sponsored guest post from a Sales Hacker partner.

About the author

Bill Butler is the CEO and Founder of Journey Sales. He has been a serial startup executive since joining Documentum in 1993, growing revenue to over $300M and a successful IPO. He was also president at iPipeline where he grew revenue from $5M to $50M. Now, Bill spends his time transforming organizations to sell digitally.